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Category: biotech/medical – Page 1,254

Near-invisible graphene tattoos deliver high-speed and long-term continuous monitoring of blood pressure with high accuracy.

Wrapping a cuff around a patient’s arm and inflating it to measure blood pressure is one of the most routinely performed medical tests. It provides a quick and reliable assessment of cardiovascular health, as blood pressure is an independent predictor of all-cause mortality. But such arm cuffs are bulky and uncomfortable, making them impractical for continuous monitoring outside of clinics.

For this reason, researchers are developing cuffless alternatives with the goal of unlocking new possibilities for patient diagnostics and management, as well as providing new understanding of physiology. However, none of these tools has become a mainstay yet.

One option, acoustic sensors, slide during movements and are too large to be easily incorporated into untethered ambulatory sensors. Meanwhile, optical modalities such as smart watches are limited by the low penetration of light into tissues, which hinders their ability to capture haemodynamic parameters in the arteries. Studies also show that optical sensors are sometimes inaccurate when used with darker skin tones or larger wrists.

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Tokyo/New Delhi: Tetsuya Yamagami, who shot Shinzo Abe in Nara City, used a handmade gun to attack the former Japanese Prime Minister, said reports. The 41-year-old shooter, a resident of Nara City in Japan shot Abe in his chest from 10 feet away, said reports. For the unversed, Abe was shot during live address in Western Japan. The attack was a shock in one of the world’s safest countries with some of the strictest gun control laws. During interrogation, the attacker has confessed that he was dissatisfied with Abe.

NHK public broadcaster aired dramatic footage of Abe giving a speech outside of a train station in the western city of Nara. He is standing, dressed in a navy blue suit, raising his fist, when a gunshot is heard. Footage then shows Abe collapsed on the street, with security guards running toward him. He holds his chest, his shirt smeared with blood.

Second video shows the attempted assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

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Despite the fact that sex is a basic instinct and a near-universal experience, we know remarkably little about it. And so, this week, we’re teaming up with our friends at Futurism, oracles of all things science, technology and medicine, to look at the past, present and future of pleasure from a completely scientific perspective.

For a while now, the neurotransmitter dopamine has been seen as the conductor of good feelings. It’s the subject of love songs, the seductress of biohackers and the ostensible “pleasure chemical.” But as research continues to uncover more about our brain’s reward system, dopamine is beginning to look less like the maestro and more like a member of the band.

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Buoyed by research that says inhabiting someone else’s body can change how you perceive your own, researchers have started to investigate the vast, erotic potential of virtual sex.

Despite the fact that sex is a basic instinct and a near-universal experience, we know remarkably little about it. And so, this week, we’re teaming up with our friends at Futurism, oracles of all things science, technology and medicine, to look at the past, present and future of pleasure from a completely scientific perspective.

Sexual psychologist Cathline Smoos spent most of last year having freaky, virtual sex with her two then-boyfriends. Usually, they fooled around together in the trippy, immersive game VRChat, but one day, they decided to explore what it would be like to have sex as objects instead. In their respective bedrooms on different corners of the globe, they strapped on their VR headsets, and embodied two non-human avatars; Smoos chose a chest of drawers, her partner a TV.

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The right temperature ensures the success of technical processes, the quality of food and medicines, or affects the lifetime of electronic components and batteries. Temperature indicators enable to detect (un)desired temperature exposures and irreversibly record them by changing their signal for a readout at any later time.

Of particular interest are small-sized temperature indicators that can be easily integrated into any arbitrary object and subsequently monitor the objects’ temperature history autonomously, i.e. without power supply. Accordingly, the indicators’ signal readout permits to verify successful bonding processes, to uncover temperature peaks in global supply chains, or to localize hot spots in electronic devices.

Prof. Dr. Karl Mandel (Professorship for Inorganic Chemistry) and his research group have succeeded in developing a new type of temperature indicator in the form of a micrometer-sized particle, which differs from previously established, mostly optical indicators mainly due to its innovative magnetic readout method. The results of the research work have now been published in the journal Advanced Materials (“Recording Temperature with Magnetic Supraparticles”).

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Hundreds of neuroscientists built a ‘parts list’ of the motor cortex, laying groundwork to map the whole brain and better understand brain diseases.

Before you read any further, bring your hand to your forehead.

It probably didn’t feel like much, but that simple kind of motion required the concerted effort of millions of different neurons in several regions of your brain, followed by signals sent at 200 mph from your brain to your spinal cord and then to the muscles that contracted to move your arm.

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Molecular machines that kill infectious bacteria have been taught to see their mission in a new light.

New nanoscale drills have been developed that are effective at killing bacteria. These novel molecular machines are activated by visible light and can punch holes through the cell membranes of bacteria in just two minutes. As bacteria have no natural defenses against this mechanism, it could be a useful strategy to treat antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

The latest iteration of nanoscale drills developed at Rice University are activated by visible light rather than ultraviolet (UV), as in earlier versions. These have also proven effective at killing bacteria through tests on real infections.

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Russian scientists have synthesized a new ultra-hard material containing scandium and carbon. It consists of polymerized fullerene molecules with scandium and carbon atoms inside. The work paves the way for future studies of fullerene-based ultra-hard materials, making them a potential candidate for use in photovoltaic and optical devices, elements of nanoelectronics and optoelectronics, biomedical engineering as high-performance contrast agents, etc. The research study was published in the journal Carbon.

The discovery of new, all-carbon molecules known as fullerenes almost forty years ago was a revolutionary breakthrough that paved the way for fullerene nanotechnology. Fullerenes have a spherical shape made of pentagons and hexagons that resembles a soccer ball, and a cavity within the carbon frame of fullerene molecules can accommodate a variety of atoms.

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